Help! I’m trapped in MediaCityUK

Dear readers — today's piece is about shared ownership, which a Telegraph headline this morning announced dramatically is "trapping a generation in homes they can't sell". Here at Mill HQ, we should know. The headline chimed with our writer and editor Jack Walton, who is unfortunately among the generation described. He's trapped – in his case in MediaCityUK – in a shared ownership flat he cannot sell. We asked him to share his very unfortunate tale.

Before that, if you thought there had been a few campaign pledges we’d surreptitiously clammed up about in recent weeks, allow us to quell those fears. The most popular of our pledges (which you helped us pick) was going into Greater Manchester schools to teach fact checking, and yesterday we kicked things off at Xaverian College in Rusholme. Jack and Lucy spoke to a group of talented first-year media students who write for their college magazine, Xavazine, about misinformation, disinformation, Mill-style fact checking and how the local news landscape has changed.

The teacher who helped organise the talk said the students were “so positive about it” and that it inspired the direction they want to take their own magazine in. But not only that, we even got wind that we’ve managed to persuade a bunch of 16-year-olds that local news doesn’t just mean writing about potholes and council meetings; in fact, it can be just as exciting, if not more exciting, than reporting for the nationals. We’ll chalk it up as a win. 

Please get in touch if you’d like your school to be considered for our next trip! 

Your Mill Briefing

🗳️ In an interview with The Times earlier this week, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said that Andy Burnham should be allowed to stand for parliament. Burnham was Nandy’s neighbouring MP for seven years when he represented Leigh, and she said she would have voted for him to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. “I think he’s a huge asset to the party. And I’ve said before — I’ll say again — I’ll support him in whatever he wants to do.” Nandy said that while she respected the NEC’s decision to block Burnham, with many feeling that decision was linked to him being a possible threat to the leadership, she thinks Labour members “deserve to be in the driving seat of their own lives, and it offends me when people are not.”

🚒 A terraced building on King Street in Oldham collapsed yesterday, with two people taken to hospital — though their injuries aren’t thought to be serious. There were five people inside at the time of the incident, who all managed to escape after the front of the building, covered in scaffolding, caved in. Kwok Wong, who owns Ree Ming Chippy in Royton, told the BBC ambulances and the fire service were at the scene when he arrived at the shop. “The building was a mess. Air ambulances landed on top of Mecca Bingo roof," he added. King Street remains sealed off and Oldham Council has opened a help centre for affected residents. 

🏆 The Mill talent factory can boast (sort of) about winning another prestigious award, this time for our former editor, Harry Shukman. Back in 2022, Harry was working at Mill HQ when he began a project that evolved into a dramatic career pivot. At the time, we’ll admit that we wondered what had gotten into him: what could possibly spur someone to leave their position at the most exciting new media start-up in British journalism? But, in fairness to Harry, his decision to spend a year infiltrating Britain’s far-right, and subsequently writing his debut book, Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right (which we highly recommend), has just won him The Times’ Young Writer of the Year award. You can read more about what The Times describes as an “unsettling, bracing read” here. 

Help! I’m trapped in MediaCityUK

If my Grandad is a wise man, and the jury is still out, you should avoid spending your money in pubs, tattoo parlours and casinos. A better investment is property, and he should know. Having moved from the north-east to the south-east back in the 1960s, he shrewdly bought two bungalows in Margate for about £3,000 each. These days he’s a kind of coastal Trump figure, and he sleeps on a bed of gold.

Of course, that was the ‘60s — when you could swap your mule for a handful of magic beans and by the turn of the millennium you’d have a half-a-mill bungalow in the same post-code as Tracey Emin and all her cool mates from London. But my grandad wasn’t wrong. His life-advice rarely erred, such as his assertion that you should “drink lots of water because race horses drink water and they’re very fast”.

And so in 2023, with £10,000 to my name and having been turfed out by my girlfriend, I decided to hop aboard the ladder. It was a move designed to prove that I wasn’t the sorry case she and indeed all her predecessors and successors would eventually come to clock me as. I was to be a responsible young property owner — a man of upward motion. Perhaps, I wondered privately, my humble lot would become a little portfolio, and I could rebrand as a Gary Neville-type figure, eventually moving on to hotels (named in the style of Neville, after my past-life: Hotel Journalism, perhaps, or Hotel Words) and multi-use developments, knocking down pubs and synagogues with a smile.

I’d have been better off sticking it all on red. It was a nice dream, but it fell at the first hurdle: I invested in Shared Ownership. 

Shared Ownership gets a bad rap. Most articles written on the subject feature phrases like “horror story” and “hell”. I knew this at the time so I can hardly claim to have been conned, but while my personal experience hasn’t been as bad as Chris and Diana here, who described their move into property-ownership as nothing short of “traumatic”, it certainly hasn’t been great. 

Shared Ownership is a government scheme in which the buyer buys a chunk of a property — generally anywhere between 25-75% — and pays rent on the rest. It was introduced in the late 1970s. The properties in question are often in big tower blocks, so there tends to also be a service charge. I moved into one such block – High Definition at MediaCity – not because I enjoy Patagonian winds, dinners at Prezzo and the colour grey, but because I wanted to own, and partly because I hoped Jim Ratcliffe’s regeneration of the area would make me filthy rich.

Here’s what I pay: mortgage (£270), rent (£360), service charge (£175), council tax (£161) and bills (£176), amounting to a total of £1,142. I earn £35,000 a year — although I did request a pay-rise on Friday so you can email here to put in a good word to Joshi — which puts my bills at pretty much 50% of my money after tax. Depressing, then, but not too unusual.

Manchester is thronging with the likes of me — young, not from round here, with a little saved but not enough for a full deposit — which is why it's becoming a hotspot of shared ownership flats. There isn’t great data on the exact number of shared owners in the city unfortunately, with the last recording being 7,000 in 2021 — most of them in their 20s and 30s. It is something Manchester City Council has been actively encouraging since though, and the numbers will certainly be higher now. And not everyone is thrilled.